At the risk of being serious though, I would recommend you brace yourself for a massive initial sense of buyers remorse.
You probably will hate it. You probably will regret it.
But try and push through. I sense you’re somebody who is genuinely interested in being productive (rather than solely being addicted to new processes and new gear) and this might well be the means to facilitate that,
I’m partially directing this message to myself, as (if the fucking MDF ever arrives) I should be rigging my home studio any moment now and I’m already thinking I’ve given myself a steep challenge to get my head around things. I’ve gone for a hybrid setup and I’ve got to stick with it, learn the fucker and make stuff.
Hate all you want, the choice is really solid.
Lifelong pc user here, after my last one I tried different “beasts of a laptops”, failed terribly after 2, thought fuck it, bought an m1 air and this has been the best machine i’ve ever had.
The battery, apple silicon, the form factor and the portability- unmatched.
I’ve done small ableton live-sessions, HUGE vcv rack sessions, mega reaper sessions, quite complicated fully programmed theatreproductions - it has handled them in a breeze.
I’m happy you got talked into it
I got an M1 Mini 8GB/256GB for just over £400 on eBay, there was an eBay voucher at the time which shaved £50 off. I’d say stretch to 16gb/512 if you can especially if you plan on running windows 11 in parallels. Outside of that, 8GB ram has been fine though. At some point I’d like to replace it with an air 16gb/512gb.
I bought it because I needed to compile universal binaries & I haven’t switched on my PC in months now. I can compile windows binaries using parallels/windows 11 from the same source folder whilst still having Xcode open, which blows my mind. Windows is sluggish this way but it works, I think the extra memory would seriously help with that.
There are still things about Mac OS I don’t like, but overall the OS doesn’t feel like it gets in the way. Over the last 6-7 years win 10 has just felt like a fight to me & makes me hate working in computers (whichI have to do). Moving to Mac has been a breath of fresh air. I do also own an old MacBook Pro 2011 i7 which was abandoned by apple years ago, but I never really liked that as it sounds like an aircraft taking off whenever you try to do anything. I use it with windows now purely for streaming Netflix to a monitor in my bedroom or running batocera OS. Again I bought this for cross platform compiling. I find the air appealing because it’s silent like the mini & that really is something once you experience it.
Adding an interface makes things significantly less portable though. I just use the headphone out on a laptop. It’s perfectly fine – at least on MBAs it is. An interface could stay alongside the hardware tho. Have a recording session, all multitracked, then get to work with just Live and some headphones whenever you get a spare moment.
To be fair , my 12 core ryzen can do 80 tracks projects that wont work on a mac mini with 32 gbyte ram i5 mini, but its not unexpected, Win on Desktop has been stable, but i turned power management off. I shut down when i am done.
A few people have mentioned the exhaustion of working all day on computers and the ITB workflow. I’ve been working on average 8 hours a day on Macs for the last 28 years… fuck me, that’s over 53,000 hours Power Mac 8100, Quadra 9600, G3 Power Mac, G4 & G5 Tower blah, blah, blah… I can’t ever recalling ever having much of an issue with any of them really in all that time. I think that stability combined with the OS makes the experience pretty much straight forward, and I doubt I would have found it as easy to transition to doing music on a Mac outside of work if they were not so straight forward to use. That’s not to say that PCs are a wrong choice, just my experience on the Mac side.
All jokes aside I work with windows all day, besides the user, mostly good. That said, I bought a M1 MBA for music. Though my wife stole it for work, whenever I take it for a spin it just works. No driver bullshit, fast, and super portable.
This was a really good read! But it mentions that the 6-10ms was for Windows versions prior to Win10, Win10 and later its shown to be 1.3ms.
Before Windows 10, the latency of the audio engine was equal to ~12 ms for applications that use floating point data and ~6 ms for applications that use integer data
In Windows 10 and later, the latency has been reduced to 1.3 ms for all applications
